An analysis of the biggest problem with goonstation: apathy

[ferriswheel1]

A related issue to apathy is a lack of cooperation and interdependence between departments and players in general.

edit: I think the main areas lacking in cooperation are hydro-medbay, chem-medbay, mining-everybody, chem-hydro (but not vice versa), everybody-qm.

The key reason departments don't cooperate is that there's nothing significant to actually provide. Mining, for example, is only useful for a few robotics upgrades and pod parts. QM is a desolate wasteland half the time because most of the resources it provides can be gotten far more easily elsewhere. Hydroponics is useless for any meds other than omnizine because medbay has such a large supply. Reducing the current pool of resources, as well as making resources more useful would go a long way to fostering cooperation.

In addition, cooperation works best as a mutual relationship between partners. If I send some resources to robotics as a miner, I'm not likely to see anything coming back apart from thanks, which would probably encourage most players to keep their resources to build stuff for themselves. Likewise, as a roboticist, I can't really do anything for the nice QM or miner who chose to send me resources. If I could build, say a mining drone or loader-bot for them, they would be much more inclined to send me resources in return. The same goes for most producer-user relationships like medbay and hydroponics.